Section 10 — Publication 5258 — Guide for Affordable Care

10.1 | Structure of Transmission

Following is a high-level content model of a transmission XML:

Transmission SOAP Envelope SOAP Header ACA Business Header ACA Security Header WSSESecurity Header Manifest Header SOAP Body Form Data File (MTOM Attachment)

See Section 12.1 for a description of the Processing Assertions, associated error codes and actions relevant to errors detected in IRS Portal that result in a rejection of the message. In these cases, AIR does not receive the transmission for processing and thus IRS does not have a record of the transmission. The Transmitter must fix the problem that resulted in the error condition and retransmit the transmission exactly as intended (i.e., Original records, Correction records, or Replacement transmission).

10.2 | Validation of Transmission

Validation of Transmission requires that the transmission, which is an XML document, complies with latest published XML schema, schema versioning rules, encoding scheme, etc. This section covers important aspects of transmission validation rules.

When entering character data into an XML document, it is important to ensure that the specified encoding supports the characters provided. By design, AIR uses Unicode Transformation Format-8 (UTF-8). AIR does not support any other encoding scheme (for example, UTF-16 and UTF-32).

Schema versions are baselined as major or minor releases. A major release is not backward compatible. That is to say, that XML documents developed against an older release of the XML Schema will not validate against the updated release of the XML Schema. A release of the XML Schema is considered major if it introduces mandatory (required) structural changes (e.g., an “optional” XML element is changed to “required” or new “required” elements are introduced).

Whereas a minor release of the XML Schema is backward compatible in that no mandatory structural changes are introduced (e.g., a “required” XML element is changed to “optional” or new “optional” XML elements are introduced).

Transmissions will be validated against the applicable major version, including all minor releases pertaining to the major version, of an XML Schema against which the XML document was generated.

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Below are some XML resources regarding XML Schemas and software tools and parsers. (These resources are provided for information only—IRS is not endorsing any product.)

W3C XML Home Page: http://www.w3.org/XML/
W3C XML Schema Home Page: http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema
XML Spy: http://www.xmlspy.com/
Apache Xerces parser toolkit: http://xml.apache.org/

Note: You may choose any third-party parser toolkit or use your own.

10.3 | Validating the Transmission Envelope Including Contents

The transmission file is a MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) multi-part document that conforms to the “SOAP 1.1 with attachments” standard. It consists of two parts: the SOAP envelope and the SOAP attachment. The SOAP envelope maintains transmission level information, and the SOAP attachment contains the returns. MIME boundaries separate the two parts in the multi-part document.

The SOAP envelope consists of a SOAP header and a SOAP body. The SOAP header, also referred to as the transmission header in AIR, contains information about the transmitter and the transmission. The SOAP body, also referred to as the transmission manifest, contains a list of all returns included in the SOAP attachment. The following example illustrates MIME boundaries between the SOAP header, SOAP body, and SOAP attachment.

POST ~~https://hostname/airp/aca/a2a/1095BC_Transmission_AATS2016 HTTP/1.1~~ Content-Encoding: gzip Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Content-Type: multipart/related; type="application/xop+xml"; start- =""; start-info="text/xml"; boundary="----- =_Part_5_195420953.1451508837622" SOAPAction: "BulkRequestTransmitter" MIME- Version: 1.0 Host: hostname Connection: Keep- Alive

------=_Part_5_195420953.1451508837622 Content-Type: application/xop+xml; charset=UTF-8; t ype="text/xml" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-ID:

soap:Envelope soap:Header ... soap:Body <urn4:ACABulkRequestTransmitter version="1.0"> urn1:BulkExchangeFile<inc:Include href="cid:1095BCTransBaseAttachment.xml"

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xmlns:inc="http://www.w3.org/2004/08/xop/include"/>

------=_Part_5_195420953.1451508837622 Content-Type: text/xml; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer- Encoding: 7bit Content-ID: <1095BCTransBaseAttachment.xml> Content-Disposition: attachment; name="1095BCTransBaseAttachment.xml" n1:Form109495BTransmittalUpstream.

Validation of the SOAP envelope (a.k.a., transmission envelope) including its contents consist of the following steps.

1. Validate the SOAP envelope XML instance against the SOAP schema, SOAP.xsd . The standard SOAP schema has been used without modification: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/. 2. Validate SOAP header against schema. SOAP header consists of two elements:

- ACABusinessHeader - ACABatchManifestDetail ACABusinessHeader and ACABatchManifestDetail are defined in IRS CAC.xsd file. 3. Validate SOAP body against schema. SOAP body consists of one element:

- BulkRequestTransmitter

• The structure of the transmission file is checked for conformance to MIME standard, and the structure of the return data is checked to ensure that it conforms to the XML Schemas published by IRS.

• The return data is validated against IRS databases and checked for conformance to business rules published by IRS.

10.4 | How Errors are Reported

When either structural violations are discovered, or the data fails one or more business rules, errors are generated and reported to the transmitter in an Error Data File when the transmitter requests the Acknowledgement for the transmission.

The headers in the transmission file are validated to ensure that their values (and their parameter values, if any) are set correctly. The content of the transmission envelope is validated to ensure that it is structurally correct (XML Schema validation per SOAP1.1) and each reference in the transmission manifest is found in the transmission file. If the transmission file structure fails XML Schema validation or violates certain fatal manifest rules published by IRS, the entire transmission is rejected. The returns included within the transmission file are NOT checked for errors in this case.

If the transmission file structure conforms to IRS manifest and manifest business rules, then each return in the transmission file is validated to make sure that the data is structurally correct and conforms to the published business rules. Structural correctness means that the data conforms to the published XML Schemas. For example, all required elements are present, and they conform to their established cardinality. Conforming to

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business rules means that the relationships among the data elements hold as stated in the published business rules. When structural violations are discovered, or the data fails one or more business rules, errors are generated, persisted within AIR and reported to the transmitter in an Error Data File. AIR, performs two types of validations against a transmission:

• Structural Validation – Conformance of XML data against the published schemas

• Business Rule Validation – Conformance of data to the established relationships among data elements

As stated above, when a structural violation is discovered in the transmission file, the transmission is rejected. For example, if the ID of the transmitter (e. g., TCC) is not included in the transmission header, the transmission is rejected, and the content of the attached Form Data File is not examined.

On the other hand, when a structural violation (conformance of XML data against published schema i.e. not well-formed or missing required elements) is discovered in a return, the entire transmission or submission will be rejected with AIRSH100 error code. When the data violates a business rule that checks data against an IRS database (e.g., the UTID or TCC provided is not listed in IRS database) or when the data violates a business rule that checks for data consistency, then the return is “Accepted with Errors” or “Rejected” and errors are reported back to the transmitter in Error Data File. Errors reported to the transmitter needs to be corrected and resubmitted to IRS.

When the transmission is Accepted with Errors and the only errors identified are Manifest errors with

a severity of “Report Error”, these errors cannot be corrected, and the messages are for informational purposes only.

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